The end of ‘analysis paralysis’?

The Forest Service overhauls its forest-planning process — but goes too far

In 1994, the Forest Service released the Northwest Forest
Plan, which banned logging in more than three-quarters of the
federal forests in western Washington and Oregon and in Northern
California to protect the northern spotted owl. This landmark
example of environmental protection was rooted in an agency
requirement to protect viable wildlife populations in each national
forest. Today, creating such a plan would be almost impossible.
Forest policy experts say that a recent overhaul of forest-planning
rules, while long overdue, has gone too far, throwing out the
viability requirement and other key provisions.

The
previous rule had stood for 25 years, during which the Forest
Service produced massive plans for managing the 193 million acres
of national forests and grasslands. These “forest
blueprints” described areas suited for logging, grazing,
mining and wilderness, explained how wildlife will be protected,
and estimated the effects of 10 to 15 years’ worth of timber,
recreation, habitat and water projects.

Each plan took
five to seven years of effort and cost around $5 million to $7
million. That’s largely because of the National
Environ-mental Policy Act, or NEPA, which required the agency to
consider several management alternatives and their environmental
consequences before deciding on one. But because plans took so long
to finish, their projections quickly became irrelevant.

All those with a stake in plan creation — agency staffers,
environmentalists and citizens alike — recognize that the
planning process had to change. “We’ve sort of run the
course (with the previous rule) and a lot of things haven’t
worked,” says Tony Cheng, associate professor of forestry and
natural resource policy at Colorado State University. “Maybe
it’s time to try something new. Public lands are an
experiment in participatory democracy.”

The Forest
Service set about revising its planning rules, and in 2005 adopted
several reforms. Then, in December, the final and most
controversial reform took effect: Forest plans would no longer be
required to go through NEPA analysis.

The changes mean
that forest plans will now cost about half as much and take half as
long to create. But in making planning more efficient, the Forest
Service may have compromised the reason forest plans are done in
the first place. “These rule revisions brought out the worst
instincts in the Forest Service — its compulsion to be free
of oversight from outside,” says Charles Wilkinson, a law
professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Forest planners who had worked for decades under the cumbersome
1982 rule suggested many of the changes. Instead of massive
overhauls every 15 years, plans will now be updated on a five-year
basis. Independent scientists will review the science used, and
professional environmental auditors will verify that plans are
being followed. Individual forest supervisors will have broad
latitude in interpreting terms such as “best available
science,” “sustainability” and
“collaboration.” “The new rules give the Forest
Service a whole lot of discretion,” says Martin Nie,
associate professor of natural resource policy at the University of
Montana. “In some districts, it could be a disaster. In
others it could do wonders.”

Rick Cables, regional
forester for the Rocky Mountain Region, says the changes will help
the agency adapt more rapidly to changing ground conditions and
spend its ever-shrinking funding on actual work, like trail
construction, habitat improvement and bark beetle management.
Forest Service officials emphasize that although NEPA environmental
reviews have been taken out of the planning process, they
haven’t disappeared altogether. Individual projects must
still go through environmental analysis, just as they did before.
“We believe a plan is a plan,” says Cables. “It
doesn’t affect the ground. What affects the ground are
projects.”

But assessing environmental impacts in
this piecemeal fashion doesn’t allow for a big-picture look,
say critics. Now, says Andy Stahl, director of Forest Service
Employees for Environmental Ethics, the agency no longer has to
describe the forest-wide consequences of actions like logging.
“When you get rid of NEPA analysis,” says Stahl,
“you get rid of the legal basis for decisions in forest
plans. There’s no way to hold the Forest Service legally
accountable.”

Supporters of the revisions say that
environmental groups are upset mostly because the new rules offer
scant toeholds for litigation. “It won’t be as easy to
take (the Forest Service) to court,” says Bryan Armel, a
planner for Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest.
“They’ll have to wait for specific projects to look at
environmental effects.”

Not surprisingly, lawsuits
are in the works. Last fall, a coalition of groups and the state of
California sued the Forest Service, claiming that it failed to
consult with other federal agencies about the new rule’s
effect on wildlife. And on Jan. 29, Forest Guardians and Defenders
of Wildlife also sued, noting that because the agency now exempts
both forest plans and small logging and thinning projects from NEPA
analysis, some three-quarters of its projects will never be
evaluated at either level.

Environmental groups may
succeed in overturning the ’05 rule — but most have a
hard time defining just what an ideal planning rule would look
like. “Built more on the Reagan (’82) rules, with a
range of alternatives and stronger commitments, but
streamlined,” says John Gatchell of the Montana Wilder-ness
Association.

And if the ’82 rule is simply
reinstated, the Forest Service will still face the challenge of
fixing its “process predicament” without dropping
cornerstones like overall NEPA analysis and the wildlife viability
requirement. “Something was broken (in the ’82 rule),
but this is not the answer,” says Nie. “These are
untested ideas that should have been tried out at a smaller scale
first.”